Search Engine Optimization refers to a strategic plan of making your site visible to the search engines in such a way that they find your content more relevant and offer a higher position on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This directly implies that your site will get more traffic as well as popularity, which is necessary for thriving on the World Wide Web. Before directly implementing the vital elements of SEO, you first need to understand how SEO works to get a basic idea of how SEO spots your site.
The Approach of SEO
It is vital for you to know that the search engines see the Web pages in a way different than the humans. By this, I mean that the search engines use spiders for viewing sites, which are unable to see images, frame-based pages, password-protected pages, and Flash movies. This means that the spiders are text-driven programs, which allow the search engines to crawl the Web, spot for some specific text to know what the site is all about, and match the text to the required string in form of a query.
The Working of SEO and Elements to Take Care of
First, a search engine crawls the WWW with the help of a crawler/spider (a dedicated program). For instance, Google uses a spider program named Googlebot for this purpose. Now, this program goes through the page to page links for making an index of links and storing them in its own database. This means you need to pay attention to the internal links in your site, which should be implemented judiciously, not irrationally.
Herein, indexing is the second step wherein an indexed page makes an entry into a gigantic database for retrieving it later when a user demands. This indexing is important, as it is impractical for a spider to visit the most demanded Web pages daily from the list of over 20 billion pages. During the indexing process, the crawler identifies the words that are more relevant to the page and also matches some keywords to the content of the page. This is time when a spider can fail to obtain the right description of a page. However, if you implement SEO by using the right set of keywords judiciously in the page title, Meta tags, and content; your site will not have to face the failure of crawler. Further, your pages must not have more images, flash ads, or other such content; as the crawler does not recognize them directly due to which your page will fail to appear in the index.
The third step includes processing a search request in which the search engine maps the search phrases with the content of the indexed pages for offering the most relevant results to the searchers. The search engine finds out all the pages from among the billions, which tend to contain those query phrases. After this, the search engine determines the relevancy ratio for each indexed page with the search phrases. This is where it uses algorithms (Google uses Panda) featuring separate relative weights according to a few general factors such as keyword density, links, and Meta tags (HTML code). This is the main reason why every search engine generates different outcomes for the same search phrase.
